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Ayar Labs Raises $500M for Optical Interconnects at $3.75B Valuation

July 2, 2026 at 16:30 EDT

Funding & M&A
Infra & Chips

Ayar Labs, which develops silicon-photonics-based optical interconnects for AI, said on March 3 it had raised $500 million in a Series E round, reaching a $3.75 billion valuation. Neuberger Berman led the round, with strategic investors NVIDIA and AMD also participating.

March 3, 2026 · Ayar Labs

Ayar Labs raises $500M to move AI data on light, not copper

The silicon-photonics startup hits a $3.75B valuation as NVIDIA and AMD join a broad new investor group, betting that interconnect — not compute — is AI's real bottleneck.

$500M

Series E raise

$3.75B

New valuation

$870M

Total funding to date

Valuation, in months

From a Series D just three months earlier to nearly 4× the size.

$1B+

Dec 2025
Series D

→

$3.75B

Mar 2026
Series E

Optical I/O vs. conventional interconnect

Each metric shown relative to a copper baseline of 1×.

5–10×

Bandwidth

10× lower

Latency

4–8×

Power efficiency

TeraPHY™ optical engine

8 Tbps bidirectional (4 Tbps/direction)
10 ns latency per chiplet
BER below 1e-12, 8 full-duplex ports

SuperNova™ light source

16-wavelength external light source
Drives up to 256 data channels
Over 16 optical fibers

The bet: AI's ceiling is data movement between GPUs, not raw compute. Ayar Labs replaces copper links with silicon-photonics optical I/O — funds go to volume production, test capacity, a Hsinchu (Taiwan) site and CPO deployment. Full-scale ramp is expected from 2026 onward, though published performance and real-world deployment cases remain limited.

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